The Awards Show Will Not Be Televised

There will be no hand-wringing. You know who won what last night. You know that an enormous number of voters who help N.A.R.A.S. pick the Grammy winners haven’t been involved in the music business for years, nor have they listened to most of the records they end up voting for. (There are photos to support this, reminders for “music” people to listen to the music and to the Academy members to watch the movies—Google them.) So, instead of bemoaning how “the awards did not go to the right people,” let’s think about the ways in which the weird shows are weird. For now, we’ll stick to the Grammys. What makes them sort of worth watching is how they still aren’t predictable. It might be a stretch to say that we learn about ourselves, or our culture, but there are certainly some oddities worth a couple of looks. There is also some cursing.

With the Grammys, there are now hours of awards and discussion being broadcast before the official ceremony kicks off, at 8 P.M. E.S.T. At the official Grammys streaming site you could choose between the Director’s Cut, Red Carpet, Portrait Cam, and Load-In Cam. Director’s Cut was roughly What Would Be on TV If This Started at 6 P.M. Many awards are now handed out before the network broadcast. Maybe you’re not worked up about missing the Best Liner Notes award (although the excellent guitarist Nathan Salsburg was nominated this year, for “Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music 1923-1936”), but you might have liked to see Vampire Weekend accept its Best Alternative Music Album award for “Modern Vampires of the City,” co-produced by Rostam Batmanglij and the subject of my column last week, Ariel Rechtshaid. You might have even preferred to see the band perform instead of, maybe, watching P!nk doing her second aerial performance at an awards show. (I am fond of both aerialists and P!nk, so that was just a random selection.)

More crucially, the rap awards are given out before the broadcast begins. This is odd. Many, many people enjoy rap. (The opening of the official ceremony was a performance by Beyoncé, who was accompanied by a rapper named Jay Z, who is now of note mostly because he is Beyoncé’s husband, and he got to stand near her while she performed “Drunk in Love”; she set the bar unpleasantly high for the rest of the night by melting people with her voice and presence.) But all three rap Grammys went to the Opie Taylor and Andy Griffith of rap, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Macklemore’s “American Graffiti” hairdo and crushing earnestness make him very easy to mock, but it is almost impossible to indulge that feeling because the song that made them famous, “Same Love,” a duet with Mary Lambert, is a clever, well-crafted song about homophobia—particularly, that within the hip-hop community.

“Same Love” is a tough one—it’s basically impossible to be against this song, as cheesy as Macklemore and the song and the untempered sincerity of the project are. Hip-hop’s problem with homophobia is more than minor, genetically linked to thousands of bias crimes, reported and not, and when you’ve got teen-agers growing up listening to hip-hop (I do), it’s not so bad to have a straight guy stand up and say homophobia is uncool, and to be celebrated for it. So I am happy Macklemore is there, and for this song. But he didn’t need to win all three rap awards, or, at the official ceremony, be awarded Best New Artist over the m.c. Kendrick Lamar or the country singer Kacey Musgraves, both of whom will be relevant long after Macklemore has left music for talk radio. Musgraves performed her own, much less dramatic song about bias, “Follow Your Arrow,” on last night’s show. The lyrics advise women (we gather from the context) to “kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into.” Surrounded by neon cacti—because all country music is, in fact, written in the desert—Musgraves was composed and forceful, one of the night’s quiet triumphs.

Because the Grammys get weird. They all get weird. There’s fun weird on awards shows, when Emma Thompson takes off her shoes and rambles on (for not nearly long enough). Or Jennifer Lawrence. Just anything she does. On any show. Let her be on all the televisions. But then there’s Uncle Bob weird, and last night, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s sweet and brave left-field hit turned into a Moonie car wreck when dozens of couples, straight and gay, assembled to be married by Queen Latifah, who must be a notary or something, while Macklemore performed it. This was followed by Madonna wobbling out and singing a snippet of “Open Your Heart,” which was really hard for the nineteen-year-old me, who played the twelve-inch of that song almost every day for a year. What came out of Madonna’s mouth was kind of like singing, except that watching her Lucite cane probably made you forget about the singing, and then the mass marriage probably distracted you from Macklemore’s velvet doo-wop outfit, and then you dove under a table. None of that made me think that the “Same Love” performance was a brave act, or that Macklemore had any idea how to perform. I had that feeling watching Beyoncé, or watching Lorde sing a stripped-down version of “Royals” that began with almost a minute of a-capella—they know how to perform. The show started strong and then went very wobbly.

What went wrong? Well, somehow Lou Reed and George Jones didn’t get proper tributes, but Van Cliburn did. You remember all the kids who started bands because of Van Cliburn. Wait—hold the phone; classical music once had a seat at the Grammys, and there’s no reason to beat up on classical music for not having a new awards show in place. But, that said, history does what it does. Van Cliburn? Not Lou Reed. Context! And we needed to hear Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson more than we needed to hear Vampire Weekend or, I dunno, Kendrick Lamar without Imagine Dragons imitating Blue Man Group? And it got weirder today, when we discovered that Macklemore apparently apologized to Kendrick Lamar by text for winning Best Rap Album. Why does he have Kendrick’s number? We haven’t addressed the pileup at the end of the show, where both Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age were cut off by, or interrupted, each other, sort of, and all of a sudden it seemed the show had lost its director.

But don’t blame the Grammys. Lorde won several well-deserved trophies for “Royals,” Kacey Musgraves won for Best Country Album, and, since Brandy Clark wasn’t nominated, that was probably as close to right as it gets.

O.K., here’s a slight bit of hand-wringing. If you want proof that the Grammys is a self-congratulatory spectacle masking a piñata smashing, go to this page and look at “68. Producer of the Year, Non-Classical.” The winner was Pharrell Williams, whose choice of hat on Sunday night received more attention than he did, all told. I am as big a fan of Pharrell as anyone is, and for a stretch during the past decade he could have won this award three years in a row and both the spiritual and the secular gods would have been satisfied. “Drop It Like It’s Hot”? “Like I Love You”? He and his partner Chad Hugo were en fuego for a long time.

But this year the only Williams production that you recognize in the list of works that were being considered (ostensibly) is probably “Blurred Lines,” the oily date-rape anthem by Robin Thicke. Try comparing the song with Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Pretty similar, huh? Knockoffs are not really Williams’s legacy, but, in this case, we’ve got a bootleg Fendi bag on our hands. And then it gets strange. The effervescent “Get Lucky,” by Daft Punk, features Williams as a singer and a former member of Chic, Nile Rodgers, on guitar. It was not produced by either of them—it is a Daft Punk song produced by Daft Punk. But it is (hold tight) a very explicit homage to Chic—or, if you’re not in the mood to split hairs, a Chic knockoff. So you’ve got Williams copying Gaye for Thicke and helping a member of Chic to help Daft Punk ape Chic. And Williams showed up on TV a lot, in promo spots for both songs.

The other productions credited to Williams in this year’s batch of nominations are neither bad nor good, unless you had really strong feelings about that Mayer Hawthorne album. They certainly weren’t songs that defined the year. They probably aren’t even songs that the voters heard, but they saw the nice man in the two videos, and boom, Mr. Postman takes away the ballots and Williams wins the right award in the wrong year.

Ariel Rechtshaid worked on the Haim album, “Days Are Gone,” co-produced the Vampire Weekend album, and did a variety of work with Sky Ferreira. (Her album “Night Time, My Time” was excluded because of the Grammys’ September 30th cutoff date.) That work crushed the handful of Williams productions artistically, like a backhoe dropped onto a clamshell. If you wanted chart validation, Lukasz (Dr. Luke) Gottwald worked on both Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball,” both of which helped to define pop radio in 2013. Gottwald’s win would have at least reflected the facts as the charts define them. Pharrell’s win just proves that nobody knows which box they’re checking. They simply see the name of the man they like, and then the fat lady sings. Or, in this case, Josh Homme sings, but they cut him off with a Delta ad. Good night, kids.

Above: Macklemore. Photograph by Michael Tran/FilmMagic/Getty.

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